Posted from The Citrus Report
Keep it simple stupid. Well, that is easier said then done. Writing a pop song, in the vein of Coldplay, Kanye West, or The Killers is a hard thing to do. Sitting alone in a room trying to create a song that people in a stadium will singalong to seems impossible.
The NY Times has an interesting piece today about the craft of pop music, both in indie/alt to bubble gum genres.
One interesting excerpt:
Concision, admittedly, is the essence of pop: its discipline, its challenge, its genius. To tell a story or sum up an attitude in a handful of sung verses or a salvo of hip-hop rhymes, and to unite them with music that lodges those words in memory — and, at best, also summons the feeling behind them — is a songwriter’s job description. And it doesn’t have to mean sacrificing ambition. A brief time frame can hold a lot: all the chordal transformations of Tin Pan Alley or 1970s R&B, all the vocal fireworks of Aretha Franklin, all the rhythmic intensity of James Brown, all the electroacoustic metamorphoses of Radiohead, all the colliding samples of Public Enemy, all the internal rhymes, comedy and psychodrama of Eminem in his prime.
Tbe NY Times penned a musical term earlier this year called “The New Simplicity.” Put Spoon, Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, and probably Girls in there.
